Ruth Gipps: Orchestral Works, Volume 2
Chandos

The orchestral works featured on this fine Chandos collection—an overture, oboe concerto, tone poem, and symphony—clearly argue English composer Ruth Gipps (1921-99) should be much better known. The BBC Philharmonic and conductor Rumon Gamba bring her work vividly to life on the seventy-six-minute release, so much one wonders why her work doesn't more regularly appear on symphony concert programmes. Certainly this second volume of pieces—all, apparently, premiere recordings—presents a compelling case on her behalf and makes the idea of acquiring the inaugural volume all the more enticing.

Her life story is itself fascinating. A child prodigy as a pianist, she entered the Royal College of Music in 1937 as a sixteen-year-old and studied with, among others, Vaughan Williams and, as an oboist, Leon Goossens. In addition to playing oboe with the City of Birmingham Orchestra during WWII, she also composed, and, in fact, three of the works on the volume were written during that time: the Oboe Concerto, the tone poem Death on the Pale Horse, and the overture Chanticleer, which comes from an opera she never completed. Arriving two decades later, the Third Symphony (she would eventually write five) was first heard when she introduced it with her London Repertoire Orchestra in March 1966. While the first professional performance of the piece transpired three years later, with Gipps directing the BBC Scottish Orchestra, the work has largely gone unheard until now.

As a twentieth-century female composer, she encountered repeated hurdles, though good fortune came her way too. When war broke out in 1939, the then-student joined the City of Birmingham Orchestra, an opportunity that would have been unavailable to her otherwise when orchestras were comprised of male musicians exclusively. Further to that, the orchestra's conductor George Weldon included several of her early works, including her First Symphony, in the CBO's concerts. Earning a doctorate in 1948, she earned her living as a conservatoire teacher and taught at Trinity College of Music, the Royal College of Music, and eventually Kingston Polytechnic (now University). Gipps is also remembered for having founded the London Repertoire Orchestra in 1955 and giving considerable time and energy to it for thirty-one years. By any standard, hers was a life well-lived.

The release opens with the overture Chanticleer, Op. 28, written in 1944 for a barnyard-set opera featuring animal characters, the titular one a rooster. An opening flurry suggests the farm animals awakening, after which Gipps paints an evocative pastoral scene using woodwinds, horns, and strings. While animated musical gestures conjure the image of boisterous interactions between pheasants, hens, and blackbirds, a central episode led by oboe and flute amplifies the tranquil quality of the material. Chanticleer sets a nice stage for the 1941 Concerto, Op. 20 in D minor for Oboe and Orchestra, the superb soloist in this performance Juliana Koch from the London Symphony Orchestra. Following a portentous orchestral intro, the oboe enters rather rhapsodically to lighten the mood and subsequently join the strings in voicing a folk-like theme. As serene as it generally is, the first movement also possesses ominous undercurrents that perhaps reflect the wartime period when it was written. With Koch accompanied by clarinet and muted strings, the central slow movement allows her instrument's entrancing timbres a wonderful opportunity to shine, especially when voiced so lyrically. The finale, by contrast, is spirited and buoyed by dance rhythms, and again the combination of oboe and orchestral accentuates the pastoral character of the material. The generally radiant mood notwithstanding, we're again reminded of war in martial rhythms that intermittently materialize.

Preceding the large-scale third symphony is Death on the Pale Horse, Op. 25, an eight-minute symphonic impression created in 1943. Responding to William Blake's painting of the same name, Gipps devises a musical portrait of war, not using violent gestures but in the form of an elegy and through the incorporation of bugle-like horn solos, timpani strikes, and alternately plaintive and dramatic expressions. Written in 1965, her four-part Symphony No. 3, Op. 57 begins with a Sibelius-like flourish before blossoming into a full orchestra expression of mutating design. Though Gipps' creation is no pastiche, a later agitated passage also exudes a powerful Shostakovich-like quality. The first movement develops fluidly, the focus shifting from one soloist to another and the enveloping result an atmospheric exploration. She also makes full use of the resources in play, with the score's array of percussion including bells, triangle, glockenspiel, celeste, wood block, and tam-tam. The second movement, structured as a theme and variations, begins gently with the delicate stating of the theme before advancing to the six treatments, some soaring and others serene. The scherzo begins on a magical note with harp and glockenspiel timbres paving the way for the full orchestra and a hushed episode for solo violin and viola, after which the adventurous finale, a “big fugue” (Gipps' words) of panoramic scope, arrives without a break.

January 2023